The Fan Studies Network

CFP: Intensities SI- Transmedia Relationships Between Film/Television and Board Games

The term ‘transmedia storytelling’ has become a common one in media and cultural studies in recent years. Described by Henry Jenkins as stories told across multiple media, transmedia storytelling is not just an adaptation from one medium to another. Rather,

In the ideal form of TS, each medium does what it does best — so that a story might be introduced in a film, expanded through television, novels, and comics, and its world might be explored and experienced through game play. Each franchise entry needs to be self-contained enough to enable autonomous consumption. That is, you don’t need to have seen the film to enjoy the game and vice-versa. (Jenkins, 2003: online)

Video-games are among the media most frequently cited in discussions of transmedia storytelling, and academic analysis of video-games is many and varied. In this special issue, however, we turn our analysis to board games, and ask how they can be examined through the model of transmedia storytelling; what processes of adaptation are at work in turning a board game into a film or vice versa; and how do these adaptations or transmedia stories affect the ways in which the different texts are read and understood.

With this in mind, the journal Intensities will be producing a special issue based on these concerns, with the aim of bringing together contributors from a range of academic disciplines.  We hope to include papers which offer a wide range of perspectives on the processes of adapting board games to screen and vice versa, from analyses of the games themselves, to the responses of audiences to the screen adaptations, to the roles the games play in furthering fans’ interactions with the text(s).

We are currently accepting proposals of approximately 300 words in length, focusing on any element of the transmedia relationships and adaptive processes that occur between film/television and board games.  The available topics may include, but are not limited to, the following:

• How adaptation theory is either applicable or needs rethinking based on the nature of the media.
• Comparative case studies between film/television texts that have been adapted from board games and games that have their source in film/television texts.
• How the adaptive processes from film/television to board games and vice versa are inherently different or similar.
• Historical research into the production or industrial development of film/television texts or board games based on previously existing properties from the other medium.
• The promotion and marketing of such adaptations and how they were directed to appeal to the general public.
• The industrial logic and socioeconomic conditions which have deemed such texts as potentially profitable.

Please include a short bio of approximately 150 words, and state whether you believe your proposal is suited to a full paper of approximately 7,000 words, or a short paper of approximately 1,500 words.   All proposals should be sent to bethanvjones@hotmail.com andwickscripts@hotmail.com, to be received no later than 10 June 2013.

Cited as an important influence to filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to Gaspar Noé, Italian director Dario Argento occupies a curious position in film history. With a career spanning more than 40 years, in which he’s made more than 20 films, Argento has attracted relatively little critical attention in the academy. With the only sustained (English-language) book-length consideration of the director’s work being first released more than 20 years ago, this collection seeks to explore Argento’s films through a range of analytical and methodological approaches, and to offer new perspectives on the director’s body of work. In compiling a variety of international critical and scholarly voices, the collection hopes to provide a rigorous consideration of Argento’s work and to consider his wider cultural significance as a director.

Please note that this collection has been contracted with Wallflower Press (imprint of Columbia University Press) and a number of submissions have already been accepted.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

– Visual style and aesthetics
– Argento as auteur
– Film sound and Argento’s work
– The city and urban space in Argento’s films
– The body/corporeality in Argento’s films
– Issues of gender and sexuality
– Issues of genre and style
– New readings of violence in Argento’s work
– Cult film status and fandom
– Argento as influence
– Little considered Argento films (such as the most recent films)

Please submit a proposal of 300 – 400 words, along with a brief (50 word) bio attached. Accepted essays will be between 6,000 – 7,000 words, with full drafts due 30th November, 2013.

Send your proposal (as a Microsoft word attachment) by Friday 14th June 2013 to:
Alexia Kannas (RMIT Melbourne, Australia)
Email: alexia.kannas@rmit.edu.au

Edited by Kristopher Woofter and Jasie Stokes

Joss Whedon’s and Drew Goddard’s recent horror film, The Cabin in the Woods (2012, produced 2010), was released to general critical praise, but left many fans and scholar-fans divided regarding the film’s love-hate relationship with the genre, its framing of the horror audience as both savvy and deluded, and its simultaneous celebration and ridicule of horror conventions.  

Trading on character types of the 1980s Slasher film, but decidedly not a Slasher film in any other way, Cabin left many viewers wondering how to place the film: Is it a deconstruction of a horror genre in a state of crisis? A fraught film, caught between the sensibilities of a “visionary” Whedon and the horror fanboy approach of Goddard? Is it a satire? A comedy? Or is it, as Whedon has intimated in several interviews, an ethical interrogation of horror’s ostensible turn to “torture porn,” a contested term in scholarship identifying a trend of spectacle horror in films as diverse as Mel Gibson’s splatter-prone The Last Temptation of Christ(2004), Eli Roth’s interesting hybrid, Hostel (2005), and recent French philosophical horror film, Martyrs (2008)?

Regardless of how successful one gauges The Cabin in the Woods as critique, Whedon and Goddard have created their film as a commentary on the state of the horror genre specifically, and horror artistry, reception, and viewership more generally. If the film is an act of horror criticism, then it is largely in line with the most popular critical concepts applied to horror since the 1970s—that of Carol Clover’s trend-setting (and over-applied) work on the “final girl,” and of feminist criticism of the male “gaze” initiated by Laura Mulvey and then debated in the work of Linda Williams, Carol Clover, Cynthia Freeland, and others.

This special issue of Slayage hopes to generate discussion around The Cabin in the Woods within a number of contexts: historical, cultural, commercial, artistic, generic, thematic, theoretical. We especially encourage essays that take on The Cabin in the Woods’s own theoretical pretensions—around the cinematic gaze, media saturation, surveillance, horror fandom, horror genre conventions, other genre conventions, horror viewership, monsters and monstrosity, corporatized media, the Hollywood “dream machine,” and so on. Illuminating comparisons to recent trends in horror in cinema and on television (not necessarily related to Whedon’s or Goddard’s other work), as well as to specific films from any era of horror, are most welcome.

Please send a proposal of not more than 250 words to Jasie Stokes (jasiestokes@gmail.com) and Kristopher Woofter (hauntologist@gmail.com) by Friday, 7 June, 2013. Begin your email subject line with the following “tag”: [Cabin].

We will notify you within a week after the deadline if your proposal is accepted. Please note that if your proposal is accepted, a first draft of your essay will be expected by no later than Friday, 30 August, 2013.

Intensities – The Journal of Cult Media has relaunched and is currently accepting submissions for issue six.

Issue 6 Historical Approaches to Cult TV

This issue seeks submissions examining TV shows that have acquired cult status at a historical distance – both established cult shows (The Avengers, The Prisoner, the ‘classic’ series of Doctor Who) and those that have received less (or possibly even no) critical attention. In addition, the papers will locate those shows historically, either by drawing on archive materials or suggesting new cultural, historical or institutional contexts in which they might be understood.

Submissions should be sent to intensities@brunel.ac.uk. They should be between 6000 and 8000 words, referenced Harvard style and sent as a word document – a 200 word abstract should be sent as a separate document.

For more information see http://intensitiescultmedia.wordpress.com/2013/03/05/current-call-for-papers-issue-6-historical-approaches-to-cult-tv/